Today is a big day in the tagliatella and the managers, who know it, have prepared themselves. The waiter who serves us has a heart crossed by an arrow painted on his cheek, the room is decorated with red balloons and gold confetti scattered on the floor and on each table you can find a candle surrounded by fake plastic petals. For the rest, it is our usual good place, this 300-square-meter market with 40 tables, decorated with trattoria Baroque and little intimate lighting that we all know very well.
For dinner service, the chain’s restaurants posted the full capacity poster throughout the center of Madrid many hours before starting. My farsighted boy had found us a table at one of the branches that border the M-30, the one closest to home, and thank goodness, because otherwise we would have had to wait for one of the tables to finish, like It has happened to some clueless people who have entered before us. Luckily here we are celebrating loveescaping from the routine for a few hours on a working Tuesday together with many other couples who have wanted to join this kind of modern ritual.
In case anyone is clueless, La Tagliatella, from the Polish holding company AmRest, has become for five years on social networks undisputed valentine iconor more specifically, as an icon of the way an affective sensitivity celebrates this date: the normie. We are talking about those two 20-something kids who send each other one of those Valentine’s phrases for WhatsApp in the morning, give each other a rose and at the last minute, both well groomed, approach the franchised temple, living happily and without pretensions their stereotypical Italian love, inside a kind of Plato’s cave of concepts such as gastronomy or elegance. Kiss FM ideology. Basic people and, apparently, immune to cynical suspicion with which the world makes us socialize by default.
Like everything that ends up being devoured by the digital discussion, the concept has already gone through all its possible positioning cycles: from criticizing those tacky rednecks to respect them in their authenticity, then to make their unbiased claim and, finally, to claim them with a whiff of intellectual superiority. The logical conclusion is that it is already impossible to go (or decide not to go) to La Tagliatella on Valentine’s Day without doing some kind of statement.
“But don’t call it marriage, I mean, Italian food!”
I look around and we’re in an episode of First Dates. I do not usually watch the program, I have only seen viral fragments, but from them I deduce that it reflects that same Spain of diverse costumbrismo and desire to love is the same one that I am seeing here: some old people, a lot of thirty-somethings, some tables of two families, a 95 % straight and 100% people striving to keep the flame alive with their darling for a little longer. Even the atmosphere is a bit the same as the TV show, it seems that Carlos Sobera He was going to stop by our tables to ask us if things are going well.
All these people have come, by the way, to gochear at popular prices. That is the main reason why we are here, since we are legitimate fans of the food of this place, which, according to the food critics, is precisely a great weakness. La Tagliatella offers you “mediocre, standardized and probably frozen food, thousands of kilometers from the typical freshness of good Italian cuisine,” they say. Here I have to disagree. It is true that the Aperol spritz that I ordered does not exactly seem to come from Trastevere, that the lettuce on the garnish is from Florette, that the carbonara is from cream, that the pizza is not pizza and all those little details. But the pasta is always served al dente, the sausages are decent and above all, that the food is OK for what it costs. It’s pasta, not nuclear physics, so for the average palate of those of us here, it’s almost impossible for it to be bad.
“But don’t call it marriage, I mean, Italian food!”, Well, it can also be, and it can also be that, no matter how memeic it may seem to us, it is not entirely healthy to elevate franchises in front of small restaurateurs. My boy and I, as surely many of the couples we saw here do, we will go other days to risk and discover new, more authentic places. I also tell you: we got to the top for less than 40 euros and they gave us the leftovers to take home to extend this romantic experience to another nice point: having pizza for breakfast the next morning. There are days of our vacations in Venice that we ate worse, and much more expensive.
Barilla Compound Pasta Tagliatelle Egg Box 500g, pack of 3
But the important thing in this Valentine’s Day, The Day of the Tagliatella, of this capitalist event, it is the same as what is important in love: to accept the imperfection of our own lives, that you may not have time to find the corner still unknown by the masses with the authentic nonna’s kitchen but that thousands of couples throughout the country, as well as the managers of La Tagliatella, made the minimum necessary effort to point out that yesterday it was time to paint a heart on the cheek, hide a little, love each other with what we have at hand. There is something very healthy in being a little normie.
In DAP | We tried the MasterChef restaurant (and we think it has something to teach the world of gastronomy)
In DAP | Lomo al pepe, Italian recipe (as in La Tagliatella), but at home